


Parasam Gate

by Vana



Series: Original fiction [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Drug Use, Finger Sucking, M/M, hospital fic, if you don't like needles, the tags got weird, you might not want to read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 17:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6713698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They said: When you wake up, everything will be different.</p><p>-</p><p>Hospital scenes after the first or last of many stays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parasam Gate

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in February 2008 after I had had my first of about six GI surgeries. This was my first foray back into writing -- I hadn't written a thing in eight or nine months, since I got sick. The setting was what I had been most horribly, intimately familiar with over the months. It's not pretty or fun, but it was the beginning of the recovery at least in a creative sense. And of course I had to slash it up because that's my milieu.

They said: When you wake up, everything will be different.

He remembers the needles first, the tracks of purple, blue, yellow on his brown skin, scars from needles he tries to cover up with other needles in a tattoo parlor on Venice Beach. He closes his eyes, needles in his arm, opens them again and isn't sure whether he'll see a nurse in lavender scrubs with her hair up in a bun, or the mohawk guy who's been doing his ink since 1995. Sometimes in the hospital, under the fluorescents at 3:30 a.m. ("Sorry to wake you but I need to get your vital signs,") he imagined the artist was the nurse, moonlighting and sex changing; he'd giggle through a Dilaudid haze while she stuck a thermometer under his tongue. But he kept grinning so she wouldn't get a good read. He always did smile too much for his own good, that sideways half-cocked grin that said, _I gotta secret_ , and then the darkened eyes that might say, if someone were real lucky, _and I'm gonna tell it to you_.

\--

You get tired of flowers after enough surgeries. You have to have someone take care of them, because, shit, flowers? They're alive. They will die and stink if you don't. But you can't just throw them out because it's all people know what to do unless you ask for something else and you don't ask for anything else. The night you decide to quit your sleeping pill you dissemble all the bouquets, hands shaking like the Northridge quake, but you're still on pain meds so you're not cold turkey -- not at all, you tell yourself. Your shoulder aches from what you hope you soon can call an old injury as you name the petals, each family member of the clan that sent them. And you call this one for your sister, and this one for your brother, these for your parents. And this one for your two best friends. And for your lover ... You smash a petal between your teeth and close your eyes tightly and breathe his name wordlessly through your nose. The way they taught you the first time you came here and freaked out, before you were a fixture, as well known as the janitors. In through the nose, out through the mouth twice as slow as the inhale. Pause at the end of the breath. Pause, pause. And breathe in. This was the way they taught breathing, re-educated the panicked body on how to function. "Nothing - is - over" became your mantra. But the white gardenia, at home in a pool, gave its last breath on your teeth, while you grinded out his name one. More. Time.

\--

In the chapel he might have expected prayer, maybe some Latin, maybe something resembling anything like Christianity. That word chapel after all. It meant a little church. God somewhere, Jesus around, Bibles. Instead, there was a woman in her middle age chanting, and the acoustics of the room lifted her voice not to the heavens but to the inside of his head, echoed around, kept him pinned to the antechamber because maybe some some kind of pagan goddess was singing and he wasn't quite fucking ready.

_Gate, gate, paragate, parasam gate, bodhishava._

It echoed off the ceiling, bounced down the walls like tiny beads blown by Pacific spray. He leaned against the cold marble wall, still weak. He saw, vaguely, blurred, a couple walking past: young woman in a hospital gown and robe and those socks with tread they make you wear so you don't slip and sue them, held up by her boyfriend or husband in street clothes, walking their laps around the first floor. Her smiling tentatively at everyone she looked at; husband focused on the path ahead. He wondered if she had cancer. She was wondering if he did. They were both so young still. We all need nametags, he thought fleetingly, nametags and what's wrong with us. His wouldn't even fit on one tag. He'd have to have six. He laughed, and the woman chanting inside the chapel laughed. 

"It means 'go beyond, go beyond beyond, go completely beyond, meet the eternal spirit,'" the woman told him, even though he hadn't asked.

\--

Upstairs, it was eleven at night. The nicest time was after his IV injections of sedatives, anti-anxieties, painkillers, sleep aids, and they hadn't kicked in yet and he could just lie there in the bed, blurry at the television, thinking about home and the past and vacations and pets and the person who might walk through the door at any time, but probably wouldn't. 'Kay, he thought, eyes drifting closed, I'll just dream about you instead.

He hadn't even decided on the setting for the dream when the door opened at ten till midnight. 

"Ya still up?" The accent could not be denied, even if full consciousness could. His eyes crinkled into a smile his mouth was too tired and drugged to make.

"Mm-hm. C'mere." He found himself thirsty, parched, demanding. "Gimme your hand." 

He licked the salty first finger of his obliging guest; didn't notice the breath catch as he slid his mouth down, feeling the fingernail at the top of his mouth. He set it free and blew on it to cool it. He sucked each finger down like a milkshake through a straw, feeling but not registering the shudders on the other end; all he knew was he was getting the salt he needed and the cotton mouth feeling was gone. 

When he finally let each of the ten fingers go, leaving them sticky with his saliva, he opened his eyes a sleepy slit. He saw dark blond hair falling over the forehead of a hidden face, a bowed head. Focusing, he opened his dehydrated lips. The faint, almost-silent click they made got his companion's attention. Finally looking at each other's faces, at each other's eyes and mouths and all the other details they forgot they memorized, one or the other of them said: "It's been awhile."

**Author's Note:**

> My mom, my duder and I get cameos in this.


End file.
